Literature – whether modern or some thousands of years old – is a primary means to investigate what it means to do justice or to make (and apply) law. As may be clear from our choice of words, this course will not go into the essence of justice or of law, but will focus instead on what it means to, indeed, do justice and to make law. In relation to these topics, within the history of literature two major tracks of investigation can be distinguished: one epistemological, one ontological. As for the first, the questions are what grounds the act of doing justice, or what it means to do justice (by whom and to whom) – and analogously the questions are what grounds the act of making law, and what it means to be able to make it (by whom and for whom). As for the second, the questions are where human subjects can find justice and what kinds of justice apply to them, or where in a system of law they may find themselves and what kinds of law are at stake: divine, natural or positive?
In relation to all the theory we will be reading literary texts or looking at works of art whilst trying to sense what they do in relation to our topic. These are the texts that we will focus upon: an almost forgotten play by the French author Albert Camus, Les justes (1950); a complex novel by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997); an even more complex volume of poems by the American Language poet Ron Silliman, called The Age of Huts (2007); a ‘dangerous’ film by the English artist Peter Greenaway: The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989); a book with images and texts called a visual essay by the Black-American artist Kara Walker: After the Deluge (2007); and a moving autobiographical work that is also an extended essay by South-African poet and novelist Antjie Krog, called Country of my Skull (1998).
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